How To Conduct A Survey That You Can Trust In 8 Steps

So you want to conduct a survey, not any run-of-the-mill survey, but one that you can trust, that is, one that quickly gathers the total number of survey respondents you selected — with the correct demographic and psychographic traits.

To do so, you’ll need to be able to preset these requirements in an online survey platform.

You’ll first need to find a potent online survey platform, along with understanding how to conduct a survey that provides accurate and reliable data on your target market.

While building a strong survey campaign can appear to be difficult, if not downright intimidating, it is much simpler than it looks. This simplicity will depend on the survey platform you choose, as they are not all the same.

Nonetheless, there’s a process to conduct a survey that you can use across multiple campaigns, whether you need to conduct local or global surveys, study customer behavior, or even increase your customer retention rate.

Luckily, we’ve prepared an easy-to-follow, 8-step process for conducting surveys. This article is an 8-step guide to help you to design, conduct, and organize an effective survey in no time. Let’s dive in.

Table of Contents: How To Conduct A Survey That You Can Trust In 8 Steps

The Importance of Conducting Surveys
What You Need to Conduct a Survey
1. Who should I survey and who is in my target market?
2. How many survey respondents do I need?
Steps to Conduct a Survey
Step 1: Identify Your Research Goal
Step 2: Define Your Survey Audience
Step 3: Come up with Preliminary Questions
Step 4: Design Your Questionnaire
Step 5: Distribute Your Survey
Step 6: Organize Survey Responses
Step 7. Analyze and Present Survey Results
Step 8: Take Action
Making Every Survey Count

The Importance of Conducting Surveys

First off, let’s uncover why you should conduct a survey in the first place. After all, there are a variety of other market research techniques you can use, including both primary and secondary research methods.

One of the most important reasons to conduct survey research is due to the prowess of surveys; they grant you original hard data and facts. You can use surveys to study virtually any subject and gain both quantitative and qualitative insights.

Data, especially customer data, is becoming more and more sought after, as 40% of organizations aim to increase data-driven marketing budgets, and 64% of marketing leaders believe that data-driven strategies are vital in today’s economy. Surveys act as a convenient conduit to gain access to any sort of data, whether it is consumer-related or otherwise.

Conducting surveys on your customers is one of the most effective ways to collect invaluable data and gain answers to concerns that are important to you. This is core to market research, as it allows you to better understand those most likely to buy from you, aka, your target market.

importance of conducting surveys

So how can you use surveys as a means of data for decision-making? There are numerous campaigns and insights that surveys can avail and unlock.

Surveys let you uncover hidden growth opportunities, reveal public sentiment, gain deep insights into customer buying behavior, and even get extra media coverage when prominent publications cite the findings of your research.

They also prevent you from making the wrong business decisions, whether it deals with releasing a new product, creating an ad campaign that won’t resonate, appealing to the wrong persona and much more. Thus, surveys allow you to discover your risks, decide on whether they are worth taking and avoid mistakes.

As an added bonus, simply the act of conducting a survey affects customer behavior, along with their opinions of a company. Specifically, the satisfaction of writing a positive survey response creates a desire to buy more of a product. With this information in tow, brands that include their name and likeness can increase sales simply by conducting a survey.

As such, surveys don’t merely provide you with an understanding of your customers’ needs, wants and sentiments; they also allow you to affect their perception of your brand and their willingness to buy from you.

In this way, and as mentioned in the above link, surveys, especially those that provide positive experiences, contribute to your revenue, which keeps your business afloat. Aside from granting you new customers, you can also use them to survey existing customers.

By offering them a good experience and presenting your company in the best possible light, surveys also help you boost consumer loyalty, which is an absolute must. Loyalty is the core of customer retention, which is often cited as more important than customer acquisition.

For example, did you know that 80% of profits come from just 20% of your existing customers? In addition, retaining customers is far less costly than acquiring new ones. There are plenty of statistics that back up the claim that customer retention is both more profitable and less expensive to achieve than customer acquisition.

For example, consider the following:

Increasing customer retention by just 5% can increase profits from 25-95%.
The success rate of selling to an existing customer is between 60-70%, while the success rate of selling to a new customer is only 5-20%.

All in all, conducting a survey is crucial to the well-being of your customers and your business. Surveys help you unearth virtually any insights which you can then use to guide your next or ongoing business move.

What You Need to Conduct a Survey

If you want to get meaningful results that you can act on, there are certain things you’ll need to have and certain actions you’ll need to take. These will steer your survey campaign in the right direction, give you the most accurate and useful results and ward off survey bias.

Before we dive into the steps to conduct a survey, let’s glance over the things you’ll need (not all of which are tangible), to conduct your survey. These are a must and must be present within the online survey platform (or market research agency) that you use.

The following list lays out everything you need to conduct a successful survey:

Survey the correct population,
Use the correct survey distribution method (see Step 5)
Make sure your survey provides a pleasant survey experience
1. This includes ALL digital properties where your survey will live, such as websites, mobile sites, apps and more.
Have the ability to customize your surveys to your liking
Have various questionnaire building options, such as
1. Survey templates
2. Advanced skip logic
3. Different screening options for demographic and psychographic screening
  1. A filtering system
  2. Screening questions
4. A wide variety of question types you can use, such as
  1. Matrix questions
  2. Open-ending questions
  3. Likert scale questions
  4. Rating scale questions
Be able to create a variety of specialized surveys, such as
1. The Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey
2. The Customer Satisfaction Score Survey, aka, CSAT survey
3. The CET (Customer Effort Score survey)
4. Visual rating surveys, which include
  1. ones that use hearts,
  2. stars
  3. emojis
  4. other visual ratings as scaled questions).
5. Both B2C and B2B surveys
Access to granular insights via a post-survey results dashboard and a survey builder.
Use a platform that offers 24-hour technical support
Can conduct global market research
Leverage a system that offers a wealth of technical and quality checks to avoid survey fraud
1. This helps you avoid
  1. Gibberish answers
  2. Respondents who aren’t paying attention
  3. Flatliners (those who keep answering with the same choice in multiple-choice questions)
  4. Bots
  5. Those hiding their location via VPN

As you can gather, there are various elements to a successful survey. You’ll need to therefore carefully select your market research platform — or agency, if you’re taking the syndicated research path.

You don’t want to settle for a low-tier platform, otherwise, you risk collecting unneeded biases and a whole host of low-quality data.

Steps to Conduct a Survey

conduct a survey

Follow along the 8 steps in this guide to conduct meaningful survey research.

Step 1: Identify your research goals
Step 2: Define your target audience
Step 3: Come up with preliminary questions
Step 4: Design your questionnaire
Step 5: Distribute your survey
Step 6: Organize survey responses
Step 7: Analyze and present survey results
Step 8: Take action

Step 1: Identify Your Research Goal

Every successful survey has a purpose. You’ll need to identify yours to get started. This will serve as the basis of the entire survey campaign.

In order to identify your research goal, you’ll need to consider the insights your business needs most. Consider the following questions to ask yourself and your team:

Do you need to steer an advertising campaign?
Do you need to form a marketing strategy?
Are you trying to find out why you are losing customers?
Do you want to know if your policies are effective?
Are you figuring out what to do in the current market?
Do you need to discover your own employees’ sentiment about your workplace?
Would you like to cut back your customer attrition rate?

The kinds of questions you need to ask yourself and your company’s different departments are limitless.

We suggest forming a survey that relates to your most pressing needs, or setting up a proactive survey study, that is, a survey campaign designed before you go through with something, such as designing a new feature or ad.

Understanding your survey’s main goal both improves its quality and reduces the time you’ll spend on executing your research.

In case you struggle to pinpoint your exact goal, write down a list of all the questions and issues your market research campaign needs and prioritize the most important ones.

In addition, ask yourself and your team questions to better understand your own standing in regards to market research, your existing tools, campaigns and more. These are your peripheral questions, which will help you determine your key research goal.

The following questions will help you understand your survey goal better:

Do you understand who comprises your target market?
Do you need to segment your target market further?
Do you already have any existing data that you can use?
Do you need data to improve an existing product or launch another?
What resources do you have to perform the survey?
What actions are you going to take after the survey is complete?

After you have figured out the main goal of your research, you will need to define your survey audience.

Step 2: Define Your Survey Audience

Identifying your survey target audience is key to any successful market research campaign. After all, it is the audience that you seek to study, to learn how its members tick, their habits, sentiments, etc.

The wrong survey audience will invalidate your study, as it will be irrelevant to your business or study.

There are two main concerns when it comes to surveying participants: who should I survey and how many participants do I need?

Let’s clarify both.

Who should I survey and who is in my target market?

Surveying the right people makes all the difference. That’s why before determining your survey audience, you’ll need to first identify the makeup of your target market. To do so, you’ll need to conduct secondary research, along with consolidating what you already know about your target market.

In addition, you’ll need to conduct market segmentation, which will allow you to break your wider target market into various segments. These can exist on the basis of various factors, such as age, ethnicity and other demographic factors, along with behavioral aspects, such as buying habits, frequency of purchase, brand trust and more.

You can do this by conducting an RFM analysis, which is an abbreviation of Recency, Frequency and Monetary Value. In this analysis, researchers estimate the value of a customer based on the three data points in its abbreviated title. This is one of the models for customer behavior segmentation.

Targeting a specific audience is important for many reasons. For example, suppose you want to learn if iPhone users are happy with the recent product updates.

By surveying random iPhone users, you may notice that the majority of responses are somewhat neutral. But if you target specifically the Gen Z generation, you might learn that the younger demographic is worried about having to buy extra accessories.

The more defined your target audience criteria are, the more accurate and deep your survey insights will be. Thus, make sure to brainstorm, segment and fully identify your target market and your own customer personas before setting up your survey questionnaire.

Identifying them first will show you which target audience you’ll need for your survey to gain the most accurate insights and help you fulfill your survey goal.

How many survey respondents do I need?

When doctors want to examine your blood, they don’t drain all of it - they just need to take a small sample. The same principle stands with surveys: a small sample of survey respondents can accurately represent the opinions of a larger group.

For example, if there are 5,000 people in your company and you want to know how well the latest HR policy was received, you don’t need to survey all 5,000. In fact, surveying just 146 employees will be enough.

Thus, if you want to learn what all American high schoolers think about the recent TikTok ban, you don’t need to ask all 76 million of them. Surveying between 200 and 600 respondents will give you a sufficient amount of opinions to draw from.

For the majority of studies, 200 to 800 respondents will be enough to represent the thoughts and opinions of a particular population. However, all studies are not built the same, nor are they geared towards the same kind of longevity, think longitudinal surveys versus cross-sectional surveys.

As such, you’ll need to calculate your survey sampling size, which is also referred to as a sampling pool.

If you want to calculate how many respondents you’ll need to get scientifically accurate survey results, feel free to use our sample size calculator.

margin of error

Step 3: Come up with Preliminary Questions

Now that you’ve carefully selected a main survey goal and theme, along with having identified who to survey and how many to include in your sampling size, it is time to get to the heart of your survey: the questionnaire — or at least the beginning of it.

To do this, you’ll need to consider the main goal and subgoals of your survey campaign. As such, write down the most pressing questions you have. We suggest coming up with a list of 10 questions.

Note that not ALL of them need to be in your survey, in fact, we suggest keeping your questionnaire short. Even users of a game who’ve come across your survey and decided to take it for in-game survey incentives will hesitate to take a lengthy survey.

As such, your preliminary 10 (or more) questions are just that: preliminary. Not all of them will make it to your questionnaire, as they are meant for brainstorming ideas.

As you create these questions, heed the following tips:

Create questions based on the survey campaign you’re going to use.
1. For example, if you’re going to run a longitudinal study, you’ll need to create questions that span through various time periods.
2. Or, for a cross-sectional study, you’ll need to create questions for just one survey and thus have one primary focus of the study.
Do any of your questions appear too similar to one another? If so, consider merging them or removing a few.
Decide whether certain questions need follow-up questions.
1. For example, if you ask a question in which a certain answer requires more information, consider using follow-up questions.
2. That’s where advanced skip logic becomes handy, as it routes respondents to relevant follow-up questions.
3. This creates paths in your survey and allows you to understand your respondents and the subject of the original question at a deeper level.
4. This can also be relevant to the first point, as you can use similar questions as potential follow-up questions.
Do your questions pertain to certain customer segments or personas?
1. If so, refer to your customer segmentation and personas list. You may need to break your survey into two or more, depending on how many customer segments it can be used for.
2. You can also add multiple audiences in one survey.
Show your preliminary set of questions to your team/colleagues for their feedback and suggestions.
1. Here, you can get into the nitty-gritty of what is most important for your study by way of other relevant opinions that will help shape it.

Step 4: Design Your Questionnaire

Next, we’re going to move on to designing the questionnaire itself. This will largely depend on the survey platform you use. As aforementioned, you’ll need to use a strong market research SaaS platform that offers a variety of features and services to form a robust survey campaign.

design survey questions

Make sure your survey platform allows you to build the questions you need at ease and speed.

It’s key to note that the quality of a questionnaire is where the majority of surveys fall short. Experiments suggest that sensitive or vague opinion questions increase the potential of error by up to 30%. Put simply, your survey is as good as your questionnaire is.

Make sure your questions are clear and don’t contain jargon or uncommon abbreviations. This is key to shaping the survey experience.

A poor example of a survey question: Do you think VR is going to take off in the next 5 years?

A better example of a survey question: Do you think virtual reality (VR) is going to take off in the next 5 years?

In some instances, a poor question is one that yields scant information. In this case, it is key to follow it up with another, or create it so that it doesn’t require additional questions to begin with. In this case, a yes or no question constitutes a poor example, whereas an open-ended question is the better example.

A poor example: Do you agree that this is a great movie?

A better example: What do you think of this movie?

Take some time to learn how to write clear, unbiased, and effective survey questions to get the best results out of your research.

Step 5: Distribute Your Survey

There are several ways to distribute a survey. These include legacy distribution methods and modern ones. While it may not appear to be very important, choosing how your survey is distributed is as important as choosing who you want to survey.

This is because survey distribution accounts for many aspects of your study, including the following:

Where your survey will exist
1. In the digital vs analog world
2. On websites or apps
3. Used as part of a focus group
If your target market see your survey based on its distribution channel(s)
When your target market will see your survey
How quickly you’ll gain respondents and completed surveys
When you can access your post-survey dashboard
When you can carry out a survey data analysis
Associations of your brand (if you mention it in the survey)
How long it takes to complete your survey
1. For example, an online survey platform that continues iterating until it receives all required responses works faster than do interviews that a market research firm conducts.

The environment of the survey is critical to its exposure by your target market, as Point 2 states. This is because different demographics spend time online (and in the real world) differently.

Let’s continue with the example of surveying Gen Z iPhone users. Suppose you moderate a local school Facebook group and decide to post your survey there. Even if you get a large number of responses, the results may not accurately affect this demographic.

This is because in this case, you don't pick survey participants randomly, instead, you survey only those who joined the local school Facebook group that you conveniently happen to moderate.

This is called convenience sampling, since the majority of survey participants unintentionally live in one area. The survey didn’t account for Gen Z users from other areas with different average household incomes.

To ensure you get the most accurate survey results, use a survey platform that can help you reach your targeted demographics more precisely and at speed. In short, avoid convenience sampling.

Instead, opt for organic sampling, which gathers survey respondents by distributing your survey to the places they spend their time organically. On the Pollfish online survey platform, we use organic sampling in the form of RDE sampling, or Random Device Engagement sampling.

RDE sampling is a kind of organic sampling in which polling relies on advertising networks, or other portals on digital devices, to engage random people where they naturally spend time. This can occur on gaming and mobile apps.

This is the opposite of a research panel, which is a research method that pre-recruits and prescreens a group of research participants who have opted in to take part as the studied subjects of a market research campaign.

Lastly, before we provide a few examples of survey distribution methods, it is also critical to be strategic about when to send your survey. For this, we recommend reading our quick guide on the best time to send a survey.

Here are a few common ways to distribute your surveys:

Email. You can distribute your survey by email, especially if you have access to an established email list. The two main drawbacks of email surveys are that it’s harder to set specific target audience parameters and email response rates are generally low.
Social media: if you survey people via social media channels, beware that sometimes social media groups attract people with shared interests that may not represent the opinion of your target audience or the general public.
Online survey platforms: survey platforms such as Pollfish allow you to hyper-target specific audiences, control the number of participants, distribute the survey in different ways, reach all quotas, easily organize your survey results and more.
Survey panels: A survey panel is a consistent group of survey participants, who have pre-recruited and pre-screened, who opt into a survey study. Researchers would return to the same people to run surveys or host interviews repeatedly over time.
Syndicated research: Syndicated research refers to research conducted by a market research firm, oftentimes independently. It is published and sold by a market research firm, which is usually industry-specific and funded by several companies within a particular industry. The firm and its partner companies own the data that the firm collects. Other companies in their particular industry may purchase the data.

Besides these prominent survey channels, there are other survey solutions you can use; make sure to select the one most pertinent to your market research needs.

Step 6: Organize Survey Responses

After you’ve gathered your responses, you’ll need to organize the data before starting your analysis. As with the prior steps, this will largely depend on your survey tool, which also dictates your survey distribution, audience targeting and creation.

Here are the steps to prepare your data for analysis:

Clean. Sometimes people fill out the survey twice by mistake. Although Pollfish survey technology prevents duplicate responses altogether, if you’re conducting a survey on your own, or via syndicated research, make sure to clean duplicates and “funny” answers before you proceed to organize your data.
Organize. Group survey answers that are similar to each other and try finding patterns that allow you to structure your data.
Visualize. Try finding ways of visualizing survey responses using graphs, charts and images. Visualized survey data is easier to analyze and refer to, especially if you want to share survey results with other people.

Step 7. Analyze and Present Survey Results

The data you collected during your survey can be presented and analyzed in many different ways, so make sure to go back to the survey goal that we covered in Step 1.

Analyzing survey results and writing a report often go hand in hand, so it’s a good practice to go back and forth between the two until you fully narrow down your findings.

Here are some questions that will help you write a better report:

Did you achieve your survey goals?
How can you organize your findings into cohesive narratives?
What are the main insights that you gathered?
How can you use the collected data in the future?
Are there other ways this data can be interpreted?

Keep your margin of error in mind during your survey analysis. This measurement points to the degree of error in the results of a survey, specifically one that relies on the random sampling method.

It is imperative to keep the margin of error low, as a high margin of error reveals a smaller likelihood of survey results to reflect the true views of your survey target audience. As such, a higher margin of error renders your survey less reliable and inconclusive.

If you are presenting a report to others, remember that different audiences may be interested in different aspects of your survey.

In case your audience is primarily business stakeholders, then the main focus should be concrete customer preferences or aversions, along with actionable suggestions.

If you are presenting a survey to other researchers, they will be more interested in the technical aspects of your survey such as target audience, sample size, and data analysis method.

Make sure to consolidate your survey data analysis into one document. The document should be divided into the themes, patterns and other central areas of focus of which you’ve collected and analyzed data to draw different conclusions.

It will be this data — not the raw data in your dashboard — that will guide your business decisions, changes and all other courses of action.

Step 8: Take Action

In this step, you’re going to consult the information you’ve gathered and analyzed in Steps 6 and 7. You’ll need to create a document of your findings, one that exists outside your dashboard and is central to your survey analysis.

This document should cover central findings, along with key granular ones. It should also answer some of the key concerns you had in Step 1, along with the questions designed for your respondents themselves.

Do your results and analysis answer all the inquiries and curiosities you had about the topic at hand? If so, it is time to take action. If not, then you should create another survey, one that focuses on the things that are left unanswered, or anything you need more information on.

conduct a survey
Sometimes, the latter is most common, with survey campaigns lacking clarity, therefore lacking completion. However, not to worry, just create another survey. If you have the contact information of your respondents, just send them a follow-up survey. If not, send your new survey as you had originally done.

We recommend using an online survey provider that offers the random device engagement method, which, as aforementioned, is a kind of organic sampling that uses digital properties to query respondents where they visit organically.

If, however, you have all the insights you need, it is time to take data-informed action. There are many ways to take action on any given topic. The following list enumerates various ways to act on your survey data and analysis:

The establishment of something (ad campaigns, marketing strategy, pricing, a slogan, etc)
Changing something already in existence (ads, videos, promotions, pricing, etc)
Scrapping aspects of an ad, marketing, sales or any other business campaign or activity
Terminating an action or campaign entirely
The formation of slightly different approaches based on different market segments

All in all, after you’ve followed these steps, you will be much closer to your original goal, whether it is solely to have invaluable customer/subject data, or to use that data to make immediate or long-term decisions.

Therein lies the power of surveys, they grant you the knowledge you can use for a host of decision-making.

Making Every Survey Count

Every business has a slew of questions about its industry, competitors and customers. As such, they must use market research to crack these challenges and properly serve their target market.

Conducting a survey is at the forefront of conducting this kind of research, as it grants you firsthand insights, tailored specifically to your target market, with your most requisite questions.

The challenge in conducting a survey manifold: finding a survey solution to easily distribute your questions to the right audience, creating a survey with the proper questions, distributing the survey in the right channels, consolidating your data and more.

Following our eight steps will help you conduct meaningful and unbiased surveys to answer your most demanding questions. However, adhering to this process is not enough.

You’ll need to find a potent online survey platform to facilitate your entire survey process, from targeting, to questionnaire building, filtering data and more.

Ideally, it should provide various quality and technical checks to ward off survey fraud, offer a mobile-first survey environment and allow you to survey anyone, not just via on network on the RDE method (although this method is incredibly effective).

It should allow you to survey specific people, such as via email, or whichever digital channel you seek to use. Luckily, there’s the Distribution Link feature, which enables you to do just that.

Good luck!

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by Pollfish Marketing Team

Sending and Targeting Surveys to Anyone With the Distribution Link

Sending and Targeting Surveys to Anyone With the New Distribution Link

The Pollfish platform just got much more powerful. We now offer another major way to deploy surveys so that researchers can target the exact people they seek to study for all of their research needs.

We’re thrilled to introduce the Distribution Link, a feature that completes the Pollfish survey distribution and deployment functionality. It is currently FREE to use this DIY market research tool.

With this latest feature, you can target respondents in the most precise way: via their identities instead of their demographics, location, and other screening filters you’ll find on our platform.

This feature fortifies your survey outreach process, arming you with the knowledge of specific respondents. As such, it provides a powerful addition to market research techniques and gives you the full Pollfish experience.

This article explains the Pollfish Distribution Link feature, so that you can apply it to all your unique respondent targeting needs.

Understanding the Pollfish Distribution Link Product Feature

The Distribution Link is a new product feature for distributing your surveys to the exact targets you seek to complete them. It serves as an alternative to our current survey deployment method: that of random device engagement sampling or RDE sampling.

With RDE sampling, the Pollfish platform launches your survey to hundreds of thousands of highly-trafficked websites, mobile sites and apps, prompting random internet users to take your surveys. Of course, only those who qualify to take it based on your screening section are granted entry into the survey.

This way, only members of your targeted population will participate in your survey and they are targeted in a completely randomized way. While this strategy is useful and efficient, bringing you quality data and speed to insights, it was rather incomplete.

This is not to say that you couldn’t extract high-quality data from the Pollfish platform through its survey fraud protection and quality checks system or that you couldn’t target people based on demographics, psychographics, location, etc via the RDE approach. In fact, that is exactly what the RDE method was built for: quick insights from a vast and random sampling pool.

While this is an innovative approach, it was incomplete in that it didn’t allow you to send your survey(s) yourself to specific individuals. But now you can with the Distribution Link feature.

The Distribution Link allows researchers to send their survey(s) themselves to their exact targets, actual individuals rather than a random pool. But it can do much more.

Since this feature is a link, you can send it through various means and reap various benefits.

Distribution Link Facts, Cost and How to Add it to Your Survey Campaign

The researcher can create a draft and instead of distributing it via the Pollfish network, they can generate a link that potential respondents can click on to reach the survey. As such, there will be no checkout page, but a link that researchers can share across mediums.

The first release is available for all accounts for free.

The following explains how to apply the Distribution Link feature to your survey:

1. Click on ‘’Create new survey’’ on the Pollfish platform.
2. Then, select the option of “create a link” to share the survey.
3. Select to start through a template or from scratch.
4. You’ll then be directed to the Questionnaire page, where you can select your intended respondent demographics and other qualifications.
5. You can also add screening questions that will allow or bar entry to the survey to respondents who answer them in a particular way.
6. After filtering options in the Questionnaire page, Then you’ll be taken to the Questionnaire page, where you can design your questionnaire or alter the template.
7. If you want to screen your audience do so through the ADL tab.

When you send a user to the end of a survey through the ADL tab, this is due to:

1. 1. A successful survey completion
  2. Screen out termination
  3. Profiling termination
  4. Quality termination

Please note the following changes we’ve made in 2022:

Quality termination is replacing the Disqualification rules feature in the Distribution Link feature. Additionally, screenout and profiling terminations through ADL are replacing the Audience page and screening questions in this feature.

Capabilities and Benefits of the Distribution Link Feature

This feature presents a potent way to collect survey responses; as such, it is another means of survey sampling methods. It has a slew of various capabilities and benefits. The following lists all that researchers can do with the Distribution Link feature:

Appears as an easy-to-access, sharable link.
Allows you to hyper-target your target market sample.
Permits you to reach specific individuals.
Grants you the power to survey consumers and leads at key moments in their customer journey.
Enables you to gain consumer opinions about events in their customer experience (CX) while they’re fresh on their minds.
Allows you to understand what customers don’t like or where you went wrong as these events are still occurring.
Gives you access into the minds of specific people, at specific times in their CX.
Makes it possible to ask consumers about your company, specifically, their experience with it, as opposed to more general questions about their thoughts about your niche and cultural climate.
Brings you insights from key stakeholders and players in your industry and certain companies.
Provides an alternative survey sampling approach you can use alongside RDE sampling, allowing you to conduct comparative analyses between the two sets of data.

Methods and Campaigns to Use with the Distribution Link Feature

The Distribution Link feature opens doors to conducting several key market research campaigns. It also augments your survey deployment by providing more methods of sending your surveys. This means you are not limited to sending the surveys to specific people through a single channel.

Instead, this feature offers far more options to carry out your research campaigns and reap critical data for decision making. As such, it diversifies your options for distributing your surveys, along with enabling you to carry out and refine critical business campaigns.

The following lists the different methods and campaigns you can use with the Distribution Link feature:

Email Specific Targets
1. This serves as the classic method for inviting targeted people to take your survey.
2. You ought to email consumers at specific times in their customer buying journey.
  1. There are various points in the customer journey and sales funnel that are opportune to survey your target market, such as: post-purchase, cart abandonment/ lack of purchase, bounces, email list sign-ups, a discussion with a representative, etc.
3. There are several best practices you should use to increase your survey completion rate if you choose to email your targets.
Social Media survey invitations.
1. With the Distribution Link feature, you can copy/paste the link to the survey you want to deploy across any social media channel.
2. This way, you can compare visitors from social media with other means of extracting data, whether it is with other Distribution LInk methods or via RDE sampling.
B2B Feedback via B2B surveys
1. You can gain critical insights with your business clients, vendors and partners to smooth various contracts, processes, integrations and other business dealings.
2. With this feature, you can contact these entities directly, so you’ll know exactly who has provided answers to your survey.
3. Create this survey type with the correct B2B survey questions.
Content Marketing Strategy campaigns
1. With RDE sampling, you cannot reach out to specific site users that visited and interacted with your website and its content.
2. With the Distribution Link feature, you can survey people who have interacted with your content, are subscribed to your newsletter, visit your site regularly, have signed up for a mailing list, etc.
3. The link allows you to attach your brand and its experience to the survey, which is also useful for brand visibility.
Demand Generation campaigns
1. If you do not want to directly mention your survey in social media or email messages/campaigns, you can still use the Distribution Link in your landing pages.
2. This provides a more indirect way to access your survey, however, a landing page can provide an in-depth explanation, or a bulleted list describing your survey.
3. Use CTAs in your landing pages to link to your Distribution Link survey.
Employee Feedback Survey Campaigns
1. Send surveys to your team only, or even specific departments with various employee-facing surveys.
2. Use the employee satisfaction survey or the eNPS survey to gauge employee fulfillment, happiness and how likely they are to recommend working at your organization.
3. Keep burnout at bay with the employee burnout survey.
4. Recognize high-performing and hard-working employees with the employee recognition survey.

How to Use the Feature

Create your questionnaire
Select if you want to ask a question and screen the respondents (for profiling, quality, or screener) through the ADL.
The Link Settings page is combined with the Share page title :
1. Set up maximum responses if need be.
2. Allow multiple responses from the same respondent.
3. Select if you want to be informed of new responses.
4. Set an expiration date for your survey.
5. Add a custom “thank you” message.
6. Select what will occur when a respondent adds a complete
  1. Send them to the Pollfish homepage.
  2. Send them to the results.
  3. Add custom redirect links.
The results will be the same as regular ones, with the ability to delete a response.

Passthrough Parameters

This is a new implementation for 2022. In conjunction with the redirect URLs, we now support passthrough parameters. This feature allows researchers to pass different identifiers and parameters through the distribution entry link and redirect URL’s for each respondent or a batch of respondents. All parameters are also saved and are available at the XLS export.

distribute survey

Passthrough parameters allow you to pass information to and from a website by simply adding, or appending, specific information to the end of a URL.

You can append as many parameters as you want to your survey link.So what is their purpose in the context of market research? They enable researchers to pass different identifiers, AKA, parameters through survey URLs. The respondents then retrieve them through the redirect URLs.

They are predominantly used to track and match a respondent with a certain response. In Pollfish, you append the user ID at the entry URL and retrieve it at the redirect URL.

By doing so, you can match a respondent profile from the Pollfish respondent pool with a response on a Distribution Link survey.

Personalizing Your Survey Campaigns

Personalization is crucial in marketing and market research and with the Distribution Link feature, you have the option of personalizing your survey to its targeted respondents. You may know exactly who you seek to target if you’re setting up a B2B survey with a client, vendor or partner.

Or, if a customer on your website provides their key identifying details, such as their name, location, email address and more, this also gives you an avenue for personalization. You can then set up a personalized survey and send it to specific individuals with the Distribution Link.The key is to use a strong online survey platform like Pollfish, which now arms you with this link feature that makes it easy to make your own survey in only three steps. With the Distribution Link feature, Pollfish empowers your market research and general research campaigns more than ever before.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

Diving Into the Competitor Survey for All Competitive Analyses

All businesses should deploy the competitor survey periodically, to keep a watchful eye on their competitors and their target market’s perception of their competitors. Competition is alive and well across every vertical, so it is critical to stay in the know on this front.

94% of businesses are investing in competitor intelligence and for good reason, as one of the main reasons why businesses lose their customers is because customers abandon them for their competitors.

In fact, 89% of customers switched to doing business with a company’s rival due to poor customer service. As such, all businesses must strive to surpass their competitors in a variety of matters, from product satisfaction to customer convenience.

That way, they can build brand trust to arm themselves against customers abandoning ship.

This article examines the competitor survey, competitive analysis, its importance, when to use the survey and how to create one.

Understanding the Competitor Survey

The competitor analysis survey is a critical online survey that helps businesses across industries understand their competitors’ business performance, especially in comparison to themselves.

This survey is the leading tool in competitor analysis, which is the practice of identifying your competitors and evaluating them on their strategies, target market perception, strengths and weaknesses and other key characteristics relative to your own.

Competitor analysis allows you to assess and fully understand your market in terms of its key players. It also grants you insight into your own standing and how you compare with your direct contenders.

Competitor analysis helps you assure that you’re allotting resources in productive ways by understanding your competitors, what has worked efficiently for them and what hasn’t. It assures you don’t fall behind and keep up with them, whether it is through product improvement and innovation, customer support, CX and all else.

The competitor survey helps you understand your competitors through the perceptions of your target market. After all, it is your customers whose opinions matter most and you’d be hard-pressed for an employee in your rival company to reveal trade secrets — or any at all.

However, you can still gain competitive insights by surveying certain competitors with B2B surveys. This is especially useful in business partnerships. While you may not get access to your direct competitors, you can still collect crucial information from indirect competitors that help inform on the state of your industry and niche.

Given that competitive analysis is most productive when consistently conducted, you should deploy the competitor survey regularly.

The Importance of the Competitor Survey

This type of survey has several advantages.

First off, by using this survey, you get access to firsthand insights from your customers, allowing you to glean all of their opinions on your competitors’ performance. Whether it comes to their brand messages, products or CX, this survey gives you a clear view into how they see your business rivals.

As such, you can use this survey to form a comparison between you and the competition. You can do so by asking your respondents to choose their favorite brand in a list and include your brand. You can also ask them to rate each brand by using a ranking question.

competitor survey

Additionally, this survey grants you key data into your customer behavior as it relates to your contenders. In this regard, you can survey customers on where they buy from your competitors,’ how they shop from them, how often, whether they’ll buy more during a certain event (ex: promotion) and more. In this way, you can create a kind of RFM analysis from this kind of survey.

It allows you to conduct competitive research by keeping track of your competitors through the eyes of your customers. Essentially, it is a kind of brand tracking, but instead of focusing on how your own brand is perceived, the spotlight is on your counterparts — unless of course, you explicitly ask questions that compare you to your rivals.

By understanding what your target market likes and dislikes about how your competitors operate, you get a twofold advantage. Firstly, you’ll generate ideas on how to run marketing campaigns, how to innovate your products, augment your customer support and improve across your entire customer experience. Secondly, you’ll also know what to avoid and do away with, based on what your customers view unfavorably about your opponents.

In regards to the former, you’ll also form ideas on how to target and acquire new customers, which has the potential to lower your customer acquisition cost. This is because you’ll be armed with data for decision-making, the kind that shows you exactly what your target customers want and expect.

When to Use a Competitor Survey

There are various times to implement the competitor survey for your competitive analysis. These often depend on your marketing campaigns and the time of the year. The following includes several opportune times for deploying this kind of survey.

Shortly after your competitor(s) release new products or services.
During heightened times of customer attrition. For example, when you notice high bounce rates on product and landing pages, along with customers abandoning their shopping carts.
Shortly after you released new products, a new campaign or content.
1. This can include new services.
2. This can also include new website experiences, whether you offer a new subscription, UI elements, etc.
During an in-home use test.
1. One of many market research techniques, this allows companies to understand how their target market interacts with their products before they officially launch them.
2. It grants businesses to understand how their customers use their products in natural settings instead of at customer facilities.
Before launching a new product or innovating on a product idea.
1. You should be aware of similar such products from your competitors along with your customers’ opinions of them.
2. This way, when forming new products as well as post-production but before they go to market, you will understand how to best market them.

How to Create a Competitor Survey

To create a competitor survey, you will first need to work on another aspect of competitor analysis: identifying your competitors. This requires doing some secondary market research. A good starting point is to google the products sold within your niche.

Pay attention to the first and second-page rankings of the SERP (search engine results page). Additionally, take a look at the ads that show; these will appear at the very top of the SERP and are marked by the word “ads.”

When you google the common offering found in your niche, you’ll notice some competitors will rank for content aside from only the products and services. Some of these will take the form of a featured snippet. This kind of positioning places content above the very first search engine result.

Instead of appearing as a link and meta description, the snippet extracts more information from the page it’s highlighting. As such, the extracted content will be longer.

how to create a competitor survey Companies that land feature snippets perform well in terms of SEO. As you’re gathering your list of competitors, you can move on to the following steps, which guide you on how to create the competitor survey:

Put together a list of at least 10 competitors, including indirect competitors.
Start by understanding how customers feel about them by targeting your various market segments and customer personas in a preliminary competitor survey.
In this survey, conduct brand awareness research on your competitors to see whether your customers know about their existence before you probe any further.
1. This will keep your survey short, which is a general survey best practice.
Next, choose a particular theme and campaign for the survey study.
1. It can be based on a new product your competitor released, a seasonal campaign, or one with general questions about how customers feel about it.
2. Use the above section on when to use this survey to provide some ideas on when to launch its study and what to base the study on.
Create several key questions based on the theme of the study.
Deploy your survey at a favorable time.
1. Learn about the best time to send a survey.
2. You should send it to a vast publishing network, along with identified, individual customers.
Analyze your survey results.
Decide whether you need further information and if you do, create a follow-up survey.
Choose another theme for the survey.
1. There are plenty of topics to base your survey on, such as testing the brand trust of your contenders or for brand tracking.
Analyze and iterate if need be.
1. Then, make decisions based on your customer data.

Staying Ahead of the Competition

To remain competitive, you’ll need to conduct a competitive analysis of your competition. You can easily achieve this with survey research. The key is to find a stong online survey platform to carry out your research and present it in a way that’s most convenient for you.

As such, you should use an online survey platform that makes it easy to create and deploy consumer surveys. It should offer random device engagement (RDE) sampling to reach customers in their natural digital environments, as opposed to pre-recruiting them.

You should also use a mobile-first platform since mobile dominates the digital space and no one wants to take surveys in a mobile environment that’s not adept for mobile devices.

Your online survey platform should also offer artificial intelligence and machine learning to remove low-quality data, disqualify low-quality data and offer a broad range of survey and question types.

The survey platform should offer advanced skip logic to route respondents to relevant follow-up questions based on their previous answers. It should also make it easy to form a customer journey survey to survey your respondents across their customer journeys.

Additionally, it should also allow you to survey anyone. As such, you’ll need a platform with a reach to millions of consumers, along with one that offers the Distribution Link feature. This feature will allow you to send your survey to specific customers, instead of only deploying them across a vast network.

With an online survey platform with all of these capabilities, you’ll be able to gain useful insights on your competitors from your target market.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

How to Avoid Order Cancellation with Market Research

order cancellation

All businesses contend with the negative outcome of order cancellation, some at far higher rates than others.

Aside from canceling orders, some orders that go through wind up being canceled post-purchase, as 30% of all products ordered online are returned, compared to 8.89% in brick-and-mortar stores.

Although it is expected for customers to return products, incurring this rate of cancellation is worrisome, as it represents almost a third of lost revenue.

Unfortunately, order cancellation doesn’t merely occur within products, as it also rears its head in subscriptions. Nearly 40% of subscribers of any service type cancel in less than three months; over half of all subscribers cancel within six.

You can find the root cause of order cancellation, which almost always includes some customer dissatisfaction by conducting market research.

This article lays out order cancellation in its various contexts, its causes, how to reduce it through best practices and market research.

Understanding the Contexts of Order Cancellation

As the introduction briefly touched upon, order cancellation doesn’t simply occur among product purchases. Instead, order cancellation refers to the abandonment of all products and services that your target market was in the process of buying, along with the reversal of already purchased products and services.

In the case of the latter scenario, customers cancel an order they’ve already purchased or received, or in some cases, have already used for a certain amount of time, which often is determined by a business’ return window.

Customers cancel their orders for many reasons. The root source of order cancellation is customer dissatisfaction, as the number one reason customers cancel an order is due to changing their minds. Customers can change their minds for several reasons and due to various situations.

The key is to discover the causes of unhappiness among customers when interacting with your business, whether it stems from the products/services themselves, communication issues with your customer service team, or a lack of catering to other consumer preferences.

To avoid order cancellation, you ought to fully understand the contexts and causes of it.

The Causes of Order Cancellation

As aforementioned, order cancellation often occurs when customers experience dissatisfaction and unhappiness. These sentiments do not merely occur after customers have used a product or service, as various factors affect customer satisfaction and customer expectations.

The following addresses common causes behind canceled orders, whether they are products, subscriptions, or other services:

Longer Deliveries
1. 38% of online shoppers will cancel their order if the delivery will take longer than a week.
2. This rate declines when fewer days are required to wait for the delivery.
3. For example, 16% of customers will drop their order if the delivery takes 6-7 days; 15% will cancel their order if the delivery takes 4-5 days and 8% will abandon their order if delivery arrives in 3 days or fewer.
No mention of a delivery date
1. 24% of shoppers would cancel their order if the business they’re patronizing provides no delivery date.
2. Customers don’t appreciate being kept in the dark about when they’ll receive their purchases.
Unexpected Shipping costs
1. 25% of online shoppers will cancel their order due to unexpected shipping costs added to the order just before the checkout.
2. In this respect, transparency is key, especially since it involves prices.
High Shipping costs
1. 63% of shoppers abandon their orders due to excessive shipping costs.
2. When customers abandon their carts, they often turn to competitors who offer the same or similar products or services, but at lower or no-cost shipping.
Over-purchasing
1. 30% of shoppers deliberately over-purchase and subsequently return unwanted items.
2. 19% of shoppers order multiple versions of the same item, which they use to decide once they’re delivered.
3. Certain customer personas are prone to purchase more due to income, lifestyle or simply to later compare products.
Loss of interest or need
1. This can occur among products or subscriptions, whether they are of the physical or digital kind.
2. An example of the former includes subscriptions to items, such as hobby items (arts and crafts, toiletries, etc.) and food deliveries.
3. An example of the latter can include SaaS subscriptions or content websites, such as news sites, trade publications, statistics sites and market research publications.

How to Avoid Order Cancellation with Market Research

Despite the many sources of order cancellation, you can reduce it by conducting market research. This kind of consumer research allows businesses to understand their target market in greater depth.

By understanding all your customers’ wants, needs, interests, aversions and customer behavior, you’ll be in sync with your customers, allowing you to properly meet all of their needs. After all, the most ideal way to innovate, market and communicate with your customers is by knowing what they want and expect in the first place.

There are various market research techniques that you can apply to understand your customers in greater detail. This involves researching their preferences surrounding checkout, shipping and all other topics that involve their placement of an order, whether it is digital or physical.

stop order cancellation Given that many cancellations occur before a customer receives or uses their purchases, many of these topics involve your customers’ UX, as they include the usability of placing an order and navigating your website and other digital properties. As such, you can conduct research on this aspect with the UX survey by using the proper UX survey questions.

To better understand how easy or difficult it is for your customers to interact with your company at any touchpoint, you should use the CES survey, aka the Customer Effort Score survey. This survey involves using its titular score, which measures the degree or amount of effort that a customer puts into a certain interaction with a business.

To reduce order cancellation, use it to study your customers’ at any touchpoint that involves an order, whether it leads up to it, or occurs post-purchase. As such, you can ask questions that inquire into ordering something online, over the phone, changing an order, dealing with customer service and more.

Given that most order cancellations — especially those that involve customers changing their minds — involve customer satisfaction, particularly a lack thereof, you should conduct the customer satisfaction survey and its varieties.

This survey allows you to dig deep into various aspects of the customer experience in which customers can rate their satisfaction, as well as sound off on what went amiss, what they liked and didn’t like, along with the possibility of providing a recommendation. As for the latter, the best bet is to send an NPS survey (Net Promoter Score Survey), which uses a scale of 1-10, in which customers rate the likeness of their recommending the company to others.

There are various other kinds of surveys you can use to reduce order cancellation, such as the customer experience survey, which addresses various aspects of the CX. You can use it to zoom in on purchases, orders and customer buying behavior.

When to Apply Surveys to Reduce Order Cancellation

Don’t forget to survey various customers at various points in their customer buying journey to retain them. When you retain customers, you’ll in turn build loyalty and stamp out customer attrition, therefore lowering the chances of order cancellation.

The following lists when to survey customers and which points in the customer journey you should pay particular attention to minimize cancellations:

Customers who have saved items in their cart or wish list.
Customers who have abandoned their cart.
Customers who subscribed to a newsletter or other email messaging service.
Those who have interacted with your UI or other digital properties.
Those who have interacted with customer service, whether in-store, over email, phone, or chat.
Those who made a recent purchase.
Those who went back to change anything in their order, whether it is its quantity, a new item, change of address, delivery method, etc.
Customers who are waiting on a purchase delivery.
Customers who have canceled orders before they’ve arrived or have used them (includes both physical and digital subscriptions).
Customers who have received and used their purchases for some time (ranging from a week to months, depending on their purchase).

Best Practices to Use in the CX to Stamp Out Order Cancellation

Aside from carrying out market research, you should follow several best practices to minimize order cancellations. These will allow you to build loyalty by retaining your customers and therefore, the order that they make.

The following list displays the best practices to use to curb order cancellation. It addresses the causes of canceled orders that were highlighted in the previous section. Once you use these practices hand-in-hand with market research, you’ll be on the right track to fostering retention.

Avoid long delivery times.
1. Offer quicker delivery options, such as two-day shipping, next-day and even same-day delivery if possible.
2. This will give customers various delivery choices which they can choose based on their spending power and the urgency of their purchase.
3. Today’s customers have grown accustomed to rapid delivery options in e-commerce.
4. If a business cannot meet that demand, customers will turn elsewhere to buy from a business that can.
Always include delivery dates.
1. Never leave customers wondering when they’ll receive their items or subscriptions.
2. Creating uncertainty will only taint their perception and trust in your business.
3. If you’re not sure because if the delivery service you use isn’t certain either, offer an estimated delivery time.
Be upfront with all shipping and delivery costs.
1. Aside from hiding the date of delivery, omitting shipping and delivery costs is a major mistake.
2. Customers want to be in the know of how much they’ll be charged.
3. Whether you offer a few, a single, or various delivery options, always include all the fees involved.
Keep shipping and handling costs low.
1. Consider the fact that most customers are investing in your products and services. As such, they will want to keep shipping fees to a minimum.
2. Additionally, customers have become accustomed to free or discounted shipping fees that many companies offer.
Offer as many details of each product and service to avoid over-purchasing.
1. Avoid customers who purposely over-purchase for comparisons by providing detailed product and service copy.
2. Never allow your end-users to wonder how one item differs from another.
3. Accentuate all the benefits of each product and service.
Constantly survey your target market to understand their needs and interests better.
1. This will allow you to innovate appropriately and use data for decision-making properly.
2. Study your customers by breaking them down into distinct segments via market segmentation.
3. Study them further by analyzing and catering specifically to customer personas.
Personalize the customer experience.
1. Build marketing personalization campaigns, as this is a known method for retaining customers.
2. No one likes to be marketed to; instead, personalize the CX via market research efforts.
Implement various customer retention strategies.
1. Retention is far more important than customer acquisition, as it costs less and reaps more value.
2. Increasing customer retention by 5% can increase profits from 25-95%.
3. Conduct the customer retention survey to understand customers better and retain them.

Retaining All Your Business

You’ll need to work towards retaining your customers to minimize order cancellation significantly. Conducting market research plays a major role in both matters, as it allows you to informatively serve your customers by understanding all of their wants, needs, dislikes and sentiments.

Each customer segment is different, both in terms of its demographic and psychographic makeup. To hyper-target your customers, both as a means of researching them and satisfying them, you’ll need to use a strong market research platform.

Use an online survey platform that makes it easy to create various consumer surveys. It should offer random device engagement (RDE) sampling to reach customers in their natural digital environments, instead of pre-recruiting them. This removes social pressures in their responses, cutting back on survey bias.

You should also use a mobile-first platform since mobile dominates the digital space and no one wants to take surveys in a mobile environment that’s not adept for mobile devices.

Additionally, it should also allow you to survey anyone. As such, you’ll need a platform with a reach to millions of consumers, along with one that offers the Distribution Link feature. This feature will allow you to send your survey to specific customers, such as those who placed a recent order, instead of only deploying them across a vast network.

With an online survey platform with all of these capabilities, you’ll be able to reduce order cancellations and retain all of your customers.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

Diving into the Customer Service Satisfaction Survey to Improve All Customer Service Sessions

The customer service satisfaction survey is the chief tool to use to assure you offer the best customer service sessions. Your customers are bound to elicit customer service activities with your business, no matter how well they know your products.

Whether it’s for technical support, a glitch in a product or help with your digital properties, seeking out and receiving customer service is a major part of your customer experience. It can occur in all parts of the customer buying journey, including pre-sales and post-sales periods.

As such, you’ll need to optimize your customer service satisfaction, just as you would with any other part of your CX. This is also because customers don’t keep their brand perception to themselves.

72% of customers will share a positive customer service experience with 6 or more people. However, unsatisfied customers also share their experiences; 13% of unhappy customers will share their experiences with 15 people or more.

To take matters into further perspective, 70% of customers say they’ll support a company that delivers great customer service. 17% of Americans are even willing to pay more for a business that has a good reputation regarding its customer service.

These statics prove the weight that customer service satisfaction has on businesses. You can optimize yours by gauging this experience through surveys.

This article explains the customer service satisfaction survey, its importance, when to use it and how to create one.

Understanding the Customer Service Satisfaction Survey

The customer service satisfaction survey is a survey that inquires into customer service satisfaction, as its name suggests. It is a kind of customer service survey, but it should not be mistaken for one, as there are a few distinctions between the two.

The customer service survey is a broader survey type that can be used across the customer buying journey, whereas the customer service satisfaction survey specifically focuses on the satisfaction portion of a customer service session. In this regard, this survey zeros in on support sessions, which are typically conducted after a customer has already made a purchase.

However, this is not a fast and hard rule, as there are other instances in a customer journey where customers receive customer service. Businesses will need to probe them on their satisfaction with these experiences as well.

As such, this kind of survey is centered on gathering customer feedback on the satisfaction aspect of various kinds of customer service. Businesses can use it to measure customer happiness and dissatisfaction during the service session, learn how to improve their service and discover how to streamline future customer service sessions.

When it comes to differentiating from other customer satisfaction surveys, the customer service satisfaction survey entails using customer service representatives to help come up with the questions. This is because you’ll need to use questions specific to the customer service session; otherwise, your customers won’t want to take part in the survey, as it will come across as too generic and not useful to their situation.

The Importance of the Customer Service Satisfaction Survey

The customer service satisfaction survey is critical to use for a number of reasons, including the ones mentioned in the intro.

To piggyback off of the intro, the importance of this survey comes into play, given that you can use it to improve your overall customer experience. Given that customer service sessions involve interacting with a company, usually for an extended period, it plays a major role in CX.

In fact, 1 in 3 customers will leave a business they love after only one bad experience, while 92% would completely abandon a company after two or three negative interactions. There are many things that contribute to a bad customer service experience — some aren’t as obvious as others.

This is where the customer service satisfaction survey is useful, as it helps you find the things that bother your customers, ones which you may have overlooked or never had considered as sources of problems.

A poor customer service experience can be due to the lack of a follow-up. In this case, businesses that have time-poor employees are at a disadvantage, unless they commit to following up with the customers they’ve assisted in a customer service session.

However, even if you follow up with customers you’ve assisted, the customers themselves may lack the time and will to speak with you, if it’s over the phone. Emailing customers is the easy route; however, they may be unwilling to begin an email conversation with customer service agents.

importance of thte customer service satisfaction survey

In such a case, the customer service satisfaction survey is especially useful, as it provides a quick and easy method to follow up with your customers after a customer service session. You’ll show your customers you care about their opinions on their customer service experience without asking them for too much time while reaping the benefits of their insights.

As such, this survey helps build connections between you and your customers. The stronger your connection with customers, the more they’ll rely on your products and services. As such, this survey can be used as a tool that goes beyond merely learning about how satisfied customers were with the customer service they got. It also doesn’t stop at improving your CX. Instead, by building relationships with customers, you’re also building brand trust, the cornerstone of consumer loyalty.

Loyal customers are far more inclined on making repeat purchases than causal customers. These are the most quality customers you can strive for, as they will continuously purchase from your brand and even become brand advocates. Loyal customers also tend to have a higher Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).

Given that this survey can help foster brand loyalty and a high CLV, it will in turn lower customer attrition along with your customer churn rate, as you are retaining your customers.

All brands should use the customer service satisfaction survey, as it can reveal critical insights on how to improve your customer service.

When to Use the Customer Service Satisfaction Survey

You’ve probably had various kinds of customer service sessions with your customers. Sometimes, what may appear to be a regular in-store or online encounter, such as a chat, turns out to be something more significant, as it involves customers interacting with your support or sales employees for a considerable amount of time.

Or, it may be quick, but provided invaluable help for your customers. These qualify as customer service sessions as well.

This begs the question of when is the best time to send a customer service satisfaction survey.

The following lists the most apt times to send a customer service satisfaction survey:

After any situation in which a customer received assistance from an employee, whether it is a customer service employee or others.
1. This can involve solicited help, in which customers set up a call or at-home meeting with a representative, or when your employees approach the customers.
Directly after a scheduled meeting, phone call or other customer service session.
1. It is best to let the customers know that you intend to survey them by emailing them.
2. This is also a good time to collect their email addresses if you haven’t already.
3. This usually occurs after a customer has purchased from you.
After a customer sampled your product at a store and spoke with a sales representative.
1. This occurs usually before a customer has made a purchase and is still deliberating whether to buy from you or a competitor.
2. This is a good opportunity to understand customer satisfaction with your customer service in the early stages of your customers’ relationship with you.
After an impromptu customer service chatting session.
1. Some chatting sessions can be minor, with customers asking basic questions that can be found elsewhere on your website.
2. But others are more significant, granting key information to customers about all your offerings.
3. This can occur at various places in the customer journey, from pre-sales, to after a recent purchase and well after purchasing.
After customers interacted with a Voice of the Customer (VoC) program, such as a phone call, or in-person experience.
1. At times, your support employees may offer specific customer service during these times, so these sessions can extend beyond customers’ venting about their issues or other feedback.
2. You can frame the survey as being sent to better help the customers further, even after they gave their VoC feedback.

How to Create a Customer Service Satisfaction Survey

There are various instances where you’ll need to use a customer service satisfaction survey, as the above section explains. They will help you gauge how satisfied your customers are at different points of being served.

If you’re not sure how to go about creating this survey and need a few pointers, the following will guide you.

The following explains how to create a customer service satisfaction survey in a step-by-step way. Check out how to create customer service survey questions.

how to create a customer service satisfaction survey

Determine a recent instance with a customer, in which they received customer service.
1. Refer to the above section to help you decide what to accomplish with your customer service satisfaction survey.
Decide on the correct online survey platform.
1. There is a swath of online survey tools but they don’t all offer the same capabilities, user-friendliness and speed to insights as does Pollfish.
In the screener section of the survey, select the demographics, location and other traits with which you're going to qualify the respondents of the survey.
1. Use screening questions to select respondents even more granularly, by qualifying only those who answer in a particular way to take the survey.
Form a few key preliminary questions for the questionnaire portion and guide the direction of your survey.
1. These should be based on the nature of the customer service.
Choose the survey type you need for your campaign.
In the questionnaire section, add in your preliminary questions. Choose from a multitude of types of survey questions.
1. Create both general questions and those that are very specific to the customer service session you had.
  1. Your customer service representative will need to come up with the questions.
  2. As such, this kind of survey will involve more than just your analysts and market researchers, as it will require forming specific questions from sessions with your customer support team.
2. Use advanced skip logic to route respondents to relevant follow-up questions based on their answers.
  1. With skip logic, you can ask a quantitative question using multiple choice and follow-up with a qualitative, open-ended question.
Always make the survey unique to your brand if you send it to specific people instead of mass-sending it as in Step A.
Write an effective email invitation by mentioning the importance of the survey and the fact that you value your customers’ time.
1. You can include survey incentives.
Include a call to action (CTA) to an online survey, such as one that exists on a landing page, or post-checkout.
1. Be sure it stands out to your respondents.
Thank your customers for taking your survey with follow-up emails and a “Thank You” on the final page of your online survey.
Analyze your survey and use it to make changes to improve your customer service satisfaction.
1. This may include changing your customer service representatives’ tone of voice, their introduction statements to the customers, etc.
2. This may also lead you to omit certain things your customer service representatives currently use when assisting your customers.

Forging the Most Satisfying Customer Service Meetings

There are various key aspects that makeup of customer experience; customer service sessions are one of the most important factors, as these meetings allow customers to resolve issues, ask key questions about your products and services, acquaint themselves with your offerings and virtually anything else related to customer service.

You’ll need a strong market research platform to host your customer service satisfaction survey campaigns. The platform you use should also allow you to survey anyone. As such, you’ll need a platform with a reach to millions of consumers, along with one that offers the Distribution Link feature.

This feature will allow you to send your survey to specific customers, instead of only deploying them across a vast network.

It is also important to use a mobile-first platform, as mobile dominates the digital space and no one wants to take surveys in a shoddy mobile environment.

The online survey platform you opt for should also offer artificial intelligence and machine learning to remove low-quality data, offer a broad range of survey and question types and disqualify low-quality data.

With an online survey platform with all of these capabilities, you’ll be able to measure and improve your customer service satisfaction survey.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

What is a Research Panel and is it Necessary for Market Research

research panel

A research panel is a frequently used means for conducting research, including market research (the study of your customers). This method involves studying the same group of opted-in participants through various methods and stages that are developed as part of a research campaign.

The technique that underpins a research panel counters organic sampling, which seeks out research participants, particularly survey respondents, in their natural digital habitats. As such, a research panel is an alternative to random sampling and has various differentiations.

You ought to know all the differentiators of research panels, how they stray from organic sampling, as well as what makes a research panel tick.

With this key information at hand, it will make your research endeavors simpler; it will also allow you to choose the best research method. This is a must, considering that there is a wide range of market research techniques. Panels are just one of many.

You may be wondering if panel research is a viable research method for your business needs or research campaign. Or, you may consider using it in tandem with another research technique or tool.

do you need a research panel

Luckily, we’ve got you covered on this topic.

This article explains the concept of the research panel in full depth, which can serve as a possible avenue market researchers can explore within the vast array of market research techniques.

What is a Research Panel and is it Necessary for Market Research? Table of Contents

Defining the Research Panel
The Role of a Research Panel in the Market Research Process
When to Use a Research Panel</a
The Pros and Cons of a Research Panel
1. The Pros
2. The Cons
Research Panel Examples
Why Online Polling Software is Better
The Online Survey Tool: A Stronger Alternative
What a Machine-Learning and AI-Powered Survey Tool Does for Your Market Research Campaign
1. How else do research panels compare to an online survey platform?
The Ultimate Verdict on the Research Panel for Market Research

Defining the Research Panel

A market research panel is a pre-recruited and pre-screened group of research participants who have opted in to take part as the studied subjects of a market research campaign.

This kind of research method can involve studying its members repeatedly. In this case, the particular study is called a panel study.

It is also referred to as a longitudinal study, although longitudinal studies don’t necessarily need to involve panels, as there can be longitudinal surveys completed by non-panelists.

As such, it is a way of describing those who have agreed to take surveys on an ongoing basis, which, in market research, are typically members of your target market.

You can use a research panel for a wide range of subject matters. The members of the research panel can include a wide range of people across multiple sets of populations.

what is a research panel

Whether you seek to study the workforce of a company or a major constituent of a national population, the term research panel can apply to all such groups.

The key is to use participants who represent members of your target market and most importantly your target audience also referred to as your survey target audience. That’s because a research panel is a recruitment method used to get respondents to take your survey.

In market research, the participants in a research panel are usually the people who belong to a business’s consumer base.

Moreover, they belong to a particular audience, known specifically as a survey target audience in survey studies. This label can also apply to research panelists, as they too can be asked to take surveys.

The members making up a research panel must share several traits, such as demographics, psychographics, geographic location and more. A market researcher may also study various segments that make up a target market.

There are various methods researchers can employ in their research campaigns, in which a research panel provides insights. These include:

Interviews
Focus groups
Surveys
In-home usage tests
Experimentations
Test marketing

The Role of a Research Panel in the Market Research Process

A research panel is but one process within the encompassing practice of market research. Some businesses may decide to extract data from a research panel alone, while others may use it alongside probability sampling.

Also called organic sampling, this method involves reaching out to all the individuals who fall under the qualifications of your subjects of study. As such, it allows more individuals to take part in the sample.

Unlike many of the sub-methods of organic sampling, a research panel is not anonymous, in the sense that the panelists’ identities will not be hidden from the researcher.

research panel in the market research process

They are still kept anonymous when it comes to sharing the findings with the public, as you wouldn’t reveal the panelists’ identities.

This allows researchers to study the members at a greater depth, in that researchers can match answers with the respondents themselves. This is due to the nature of pre-recruiting participants; when you do so, you’re going to need to collect information on each panelist, some of which may be personal.

This method will allow you to understand if they’re qualified to partake in your studies. As such, you’re effectively putting names and faces with data, essentially identifying each member. Additionally, this allows you to build a profile on each participant, adding bulk by applying multiple studies.

Forming profiles gives you a glimpse into the presence of personas in your target market. A research panel is the starting point in building a persona.

When you’ve profiled panelists through various means (interviews, focus groups, etc.), you have several kinds of data, from which you can form an analysis and draw conclusions.

You can test the prevalence of these conclusions by surveying other members of your target market, i.e., those who are not in the research panel.

Various survey sampling methods will not only complement your research panel but also give it validity and statistical relevance. After all, there are only so many panelists you can interview or meet with.

Even if you study your research panel via surveys, it is not practical to spend a lofty amount of time vetting people to ensure they fit your research campaign. Thus, a research panel may not be the strongest of the various market research techniques.

When to Use a Research Panel

While businesses and market researchers can use a research panel liberally, it is not always in their best interest. This can be due to the size of a business, a limited budget, the objectives of a research campaign and the length of the research study. There are also times when it makes sense to engage in research yourself and other times in which it may be beneficial to work through a professional market research agency such as IntoTheMinds.

when to use a research panel

With this in mind, there are particular times in which companies and researchers alike can benefit from using a research panel. These include the following instances:

Obtaining a constant, in-depth read of a certain group of participants.
Conducting a more intimate study on a particular group of people.
Running continuous studies on the same people, ie, for longitudinal studies.
Gathering data on subjects with scant studies due to rarities. Ex: people aged 100+
Large research projects that will involve multiple modes of data collection
When you are performing market segmentation.
When you are building research or customer personas.
To fulfill the preference of conducting research in a group setting.
To gain insights on a topic that you may not have considered from your list of questions/concerns.
1. These insights typically arise in conversations, as participants bring up points and considerations that you may not have originally thought of when forming your research plan.
To assist or act as a helping agent in conjunction with another form of research, such as survey studies.

The Pros and Cons of a Research Panel

The research panel tactic offers advantages and disadvantages that all market researchers should be privy to. Like other research techniques, it is not perfect and for some, the disadvantages may outweigh the benefits, while to other researchers, the opposite may be true.

You should mull over both the advantages and disadvantages that come with this form of research.

The following lists the advantages and drawbacks of using a research panel.

The Pros

Panel members have a more advanced understanding of the research topic since they can be recruited through a longer vetting process.
It can be used multiple times on the same survey, to study change within a particular group that represents segments of your target market.
It’s easier to conduct in recurring intervals, given that you have all the panelists’ information and don’t need to screen them as you would with a new set of participants.
Deeper reads and longer researcher/panelist interactions are suitable for the 3 main types of survey research methods.
It is much easier to follow up with panelists, should you need more research, as you already have their contact information.

The Cons

Lack of privacy: face-to-face interviews, along with phone interviews in which researchers know the identities of panelists can be intimidating.
1. Even a panel study lacks privacy, which can lead to intimidation or fear of answering honestly.
Acquiescence bias: along with other biases, this issue can take shape, as respondents may feel pressured to answer in a particular way, leading to forced or inaccurate responses.
Panel attrition: Due to re-interviewing, research panels are susceptible to fatigue, loss of interest, or pressure (Points 1, 2), making them easy candidates for attrition.
Ingenuine change of attitude/ opinion: Interviewing and reinterviewing can change attitudes, in ways that are not always genuine, due to re-interviewing.
Expensive: Whether you hire an in-house panel or use an external one, it is often an expensive affair, as you will need to pay each panelist. Since this is an ongoing study, you may have to pay them for each session.
Poor data quality: This is especially true when a panel member is a participant in multiple panel companies.
1. The quality of the data may be compromised when a respondent is a member of two or more panels.
2. This is because the respondent may partake in the same survey.
3. If they answer the same way, you will have duplicate data, but if they answer differently, there might be bias. At any rate, you’re getting data from the same person twice, which doesn’t improve the trustworthiness of research findings.
Missing out on a larger survey pool: This relates to the aforementioned lack of privacy. Not everyone in your target audience will want to give away their contact info, let alone have their answers be tied to their identity.
1. As such, you may not get enough participants for the specific quantity required for your survey sampling size.

Research Panel Examples

A research panel can be applied to all kinds of scenarios and has various use cases. Remember, they can be applied to both long and short-term research, despite being associated with the former more often.

They can be used in market research, which is for business purposes and is centered on customers. Or, they can be used for a wide range of other research types, such as medical, scientific, social, behavioral and educational research.

To help you better understand research panels, the following list includes seven examples of them across different areas of study:

A business studying the customer buying behavior of three of its customer market segments.
1. This is especially useful to compare segments with high and low consumer loyalty.
A university research group studying the effects of sleep deprivation among students over a semester or year.
An enterprise company seeking to release the most resonating ad campaigns by comparing how it's received across the world.
A condiment manufacturer who is interested in comparing flavor and texture preferences across different parts of the country.
A business that is intent on following its target market’s shopping habits and how they compare to their competitors.
1. This will need to involve research on competitors. That means you’ll need to inquire about them in the panel, as well as perform secondary research to complement the study.
A healthcare company seeking to find the relationship between device usage and obesity.
A government program that tracks the success of a new social program for certain populations.

Why Online Polling Software is Better

Online polling software trumps research panels for a variety of objective reasons. There are also various subjective and preference-based justifications for leveraging an online survey tool instead of a research panel.

polling software

Organic Sampling and RDE

First off, online survey platforms allow you to run random organic sampling, which allows you to reach non-professional survey takers and gain a far larger reach than you otherwise would have.

This is because organic sampling involves what’s known as Random Device Engagement (RDE), a kind of polling that relies on advertising networks and other portals on devices, to engage random people where they are, voluntarily.

Additionally, in Random Device Engagement, the surveys are delivered to users in their natural digital environments, capturing them where they prefer to be. They were not pre-recruited and thus do not face the same pressures and conditioning that they would in a research panel.

As such, they are more likely to answer questions truthfully, as they have no one to answer to, are kept anonymous and have nothing to lose.

Greater Privacy

With far more privacy afforded to them, respondents of organic sampling surveys are also less vulnerable to acquiescence bias and all the other biases that involve the respondents’ reputation.

On the other hand, there’s polling software. This method, as aforesaid, provides respondents with the most privacy, as they are not pre-recruited or pre-screened. In many cases, polling software reaches respondents organically, which affords respondents the most amount of privacy.

Some survey platforms (such as Pollfish), allow you to send surveys to specific individuals instead of simply across a vast network of online platforms; in this case, the study won’t be as private. However, it is another deployment option to expand how you run your survey study.

Greater Reach to Research Participants

It also has a far greater reach to respondents. This, however, will depend on the online survey platform you use. We suggest one that allows you to conduct global surveys with the same ease as you would with local surveys.

Upfront Incentives

When you use an online survey platform, survey incentives are usually mentioned upfront. This is typically the case with a survey platform that partners with gaming sites and other digital platforms that offer in-app awards, which can be either monetary or non-monetary.

With incentives being offered (or at least mentioned) at the fore, all kinds of customers will be more willing to participate in the survey study.

Less Time Consuming

Moreover, an online polling platform isn’t as time-consuming for respondents. This is because such a platform does not simply conduct longitudinal studies — and even when it does, it can target random people who fit into certain customer profiles and customer personas.

It is also far less time-consuming for researchers. That’s because they don’t need to conduct interviews or other actions to recruit participants; the polling software does it for them. As such, it’s a win-win for all the people involved in the study: the respondents and the researchers.

Less Room for Attrition, Boredom and Bias

As such, it isn’t reliant on using the same people repeatedly to take part in a study. In this way, it cuts survey attrition. This is because some panel members may feel exhausted, burned out or simply frustrated with having to continuously be part of a study, especially if it covers the same subject.

As such, using polling software grants you the opportunity to ward off boredom from your respondents, as well as gain accurate responses. As mentioned earlier, panelists are far more prone to acquiescence bias and other biases.

Respondents of a polling platform offering organic sampling are at a far lower risk of being biased or getting bored. The latter is especially true in a platform that offers a mobile-first environment. After all, mobile dominates online web traffic, as over half of web traffic comes from mobile devices.

Thus, a good survey design, especially one built for the mobile space creates a pleasant survey experience, one that intrigues respondents to take a survey in the first place, and most importantly, complete it.

Aside from these advantages that online polling offers over research panels, there are many more. The other pros deal largely with the survey tool itself as opposed to its distribution and high-level polling aspects.

The Online Survey Tool: A Stronger Alternative

While a research panel has several benefits and use cases, online survey tools present a stronger alternative. First off, they have even more use cases and can be applied to all with greater ease.

This is because the survey tool itself does all the recruiting and screening for you. As a researcher, marketer, or business owner, you don’t have to worry about whether your survey respondents fit your target survey audience’s qualifications.

Identifying and acquiring respondents are both taken care of by an online survey platform, that is if you choose a potent one. This means you don’t need to have a pre-study interview to vet potential participants. Instead, everything is automated.

A strong online survey platform offers machine learning and artificial intelligence software to run all of its functions and mechanisms. This means, there is little to no manual labor required on your part.

All you need to do in your survey campaign with a strong online survey tool is:

Set your screener so that your survey targets the correct populations
Create your questionnaire
Analyze the survey

Those are the three steps involved in the Pollfish platform. If you’d like to learn how to make your own survey in just 3 easy steps, read the article in the hyperlink.

The online survey platform should handle all the rest. When it comes to running a high-quality market research campaign, there is a lot that goes into staving off poor-quality data and ensuring accurate results.

The following lays out what an AI-powered survey platform can do for your survey campaign:

What a Machine-Learning and AI-Powered Survey Tool Does for YOur Market Research Campaign

A lot is going on behind the scenes of an online survey platform. Luckily, you won’t have to worry about nearly all of them. Regardless, it is crucial to understand the depth of survey SaaS that runs on machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Here’s what to expect from an AI-based survey platform:

A strong adherence to targeting
1. No respondent partially matches the demographic and psychographic screening that the researcher inputs into the platform.
2. All survey participants must match 100% of the respondent qualifications. If not, they are disqualified from taking the survey, no matter how close to filling all slots of the criteria they get.
  
  The Audience section on the organic sampling survey platform Pollfish has a rigid adherence to granular respondent targeting.
Respondent verification
1. This mechanism checks respondents for duplicated IDs to ensure each survey completed is done by a unique person, as opposed to one person taking a survey more than once.
2. The platform checks IP and MAC addresses, Google Advertising and mobile device identifiers.
3. In addition, the platform works with vetted publishers to send unique IDs as an added layer of protection against survey fraud.
A layer of security in the questions themselves
1. In-survey questions are designed as yet another layer of security against survey fraud.
2. For example, a question can request respondents to answer a simple math problem.
3. Or the survey would include identical questions with the response options re-ordered to verify answer consistency.
Antibot Policy
1. Bots are no match for an AI-powered platform that is designed to disqualify them from taking a survey.
Zero tolerance for VPNs
1. Most businesses and research campaigns put qualifications based on geographies.
2. A respondent on a VPN would tarnish any study with filters on who gets to partake in the survey based on location.
3. The Pollfish zero-tolerance approach to VPNs ensures the veracity of respondents’ location.
Removal of incomplete surveys
1. This speaks for itself, as surveys are meant to be fully completed. A partially complete survey would provide insufficient data.
2. Incomplete surveys are especially problematic in surveys with follow-up questions to past questions, or those seeking more depth to a certain issue.
Removal of surveys with suspicious activities
1. Surveys with any questionable behaviors are rejected.
2. This includes the removal of the following:
  1. Answering open-ended questions with nonsense
  2. Attempting to sign in from multiple countries/devices at once.
  3. Taking an inappropriate amount of time on the survey.
Multiple layers of quality checks
1. The survey platform uses a technical layer to perform other quality checks.
2. This process includes our technical experts continuously working to avoid survey fraud.
3. There are several layers that we use to maintain good data quality. These include checks on the following:
  1. Hasty answers Check: catches respondents who answer faster than the average time needed to read the questions.
  2. Reset ID Check: Activates when the respondent answered the same survey previously, but with a different device to avoid the same respondent from taking the survey more than once.
  3. Gibberish Check: Checks for answers contain nonsensical text. This is the kind of text without real words, such as “jnfjv vdf gre.”
    Avoid receiving gibberish answers thanks to the Pollfish AI-powered survey platform
  4. Same IP Participation: Checks if a survey has been completed before within a certain time from the same IP address of the respondent’s device.
  5. Carrier Consistency: Assures that the carrier of the respondent’s internet service exists in the targeting market.
Specialized questions to identify those not paying attention
1. Aside from a layer of security in all questions, we offer specialized questions that detect poor data quality.
2. These include the following question types:
  1. Red herring questions: Asks questions with odd answers to assure respondents are paying attention.
  2. Trap questions: Finds who is paying attention to a command, usually one that asks to select a negative response. Responders who choose positive responses will be caught.
  3. Quality Questions: Similar to red herring questions, they check if respondents read and understand what’s being asked.
Constant iteration until all quotas are met
1. With the agile research approach, the platform doesn’t merely provide speedy insights.
2. Instead, it creates constant iterations until all the quotas and the desired amount of completed surveys are met.
3. As such, the platform doesn’t cease, or pause (unless you set this command on your dashboard).
4. It allows you to gain the proper amount for your sampling pool.
5. With this, no survey pool is too large (relative to the necessary sampling size).

How else do research panels compare to an online survey platform?

Respondents can rest assured that they do not need to give away their data. To add to this, they can still be incentivized to take part in a survey study.

An online survey platform does all the heavy lifting in terms of retrieving responses, while in a research panel, the researcher has to make sure that all the participants respond adequately. This is to say that the researchers themselves must check for gibberish answers, questions left unanswered and much more.

This is especially more difficult in focus groups and one-on-one interviews, in which a researcher has to make sure everyone participates in the former, and that the panelists are willing to truthfully answer all the questions in the latter.

An online survey tool also effectively eliminates the need to worry about survey response rates, as it keeps iterating until the preset requirements are met (including the number of respondents).

As such, researchers have plenty to gain for their research needs from using an online survey tool in tandem with a research panel, or even as a replacement for a research panel.

The Ultimate Verdict on the Research Panel for Market Research

A research panel is a useful method for conducting market research, particularly for studying the same group of participants to monitor their opinions and behaviors and changes thereof.

However, a productive market research campaign will rely on using more diverse methods to extract data. This involves using random organic sampling, which forgoes the conditioning and pressures of a research panel.

As such, you should opt for a survey platform that offers RDE, or Random Device Engagement, which, as mentioned earlier on, distributes surveys randomly, across a wide network of digital properties. This includes websites, mobile sites and mobile apps.

With this survey function, the platform does all of the work when it comes to identifying respondents and covering all quotas. That means you don’t need to do anything in this regard, as the platform performs these tasks.

But there’s more.

To piggyback off of the section on the role of the research panel, online surveys and research panels do have some beneficial similarities. For example, they’re both ideal for creating and validating personas.

A research panel can identify a persona over several rounds of interviews/ surveys/ etc., while an online survey tool can conduct further research to find whether those personas are statistically significant.

Thus, these methods work well hand-in-hand when it comes to conducting market research. A strong online survey platform will ensure a synergistic relationship between random sampling surveys and research panels.

It should allow you to survey specific people, such as via email, or whichever digital channel you seek to use. Luckily, there’s the Distribution Link feature, which enables you to do just that.

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by Pollfish Marketing Team

New Demographic and Targeting Criteria on Pollfish

We're constantly innovating our market research platform to equip you with strong survey research methods and the best survey experience for your respondents.

The first step to creating a survey in Pollfish is selecting your target audience. However, choosing a target audience can be a challenge if you’re unsure which demographic targeting segments are available or how to get started.

demographic targeting survey

To ensure you’re reaching the right respondents, we’ve provided a full list of all the ways you can segment and select your target audience.

Targeting by Gender

Male
Female
Gender Quotas
Other

We've updated the Gender targeting filter on the Audience page. The Gender filter now includes a new choice — "Other'' — a non-binary gender option.

The option will not be preselected. if the researcher enables it. It has no additional cost, much like the 16-17 age range. Thus, the maximum price of the gender filter is also not affected. If your results include respondents identifying themselves as ''Other,'' post-stratification will not be available on the results page

The researchers can select the ''Other'' option along with making quotas in the gender filter.

Targeting by Age Range

Six preset age groups (16-17, 18-24, 25-34, 35-44, 45-44, 54+)
Specific Age groups (Min/Max)
Age Group Quotas

Your survey begins with age and gender targeting included.

Targeting by Geolocation

Country (over 160 countries available)
City
Region/ State
Radius (from physical location)
Residential Postal Code
US Postal Code*
US Census Region*
US Census Division*
US Congressional District*
US DMA*

*Available in United States only

Residential Postal Code

This filter will be based on the data you collect through our demographic portion of the survey (at the demographic info collection section in the screener). Hence, the respondents will declare their location in response to the demographic question of ''What is your zip code?'' since the filter will be global originally.

In addition, we allow researchers to target either by residential postal codes only or by the other geolocation criteria available on the Audience page. This includes targeting by respondents based on their country, city, radius, zip code, etc.

You can contact Pollfish to enable Residential Postal codes on your account.

Targeting by Demographic Criteria

Pollfish asks each respondent to complete a profile in advance of taking their survey and uses rolling profiling to ensure that answers are up-to-date. Targeting can be used to reach people meeting any of the following criteria.

demographic targeting survey

Marital Status:

Single
Married
Divorced
Living with Partner
Separated
Widowed
Prefer not to say

Number of Children:

None
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six or more
Prefer not to say

Education:

Middle School
High School
Vocational/ Technical College
University
Post-Graduate

Employment:

Employed for wages
Self-employed
Unemployed and looking for work
Unemployed but not currently looking
Homemaker
Student
Military
Retired
Unable to Work
Other

Career:

Agriculture Forestry Fishing or Hunting
Arts and Entertainment or Recreation
Broadcasting
Construction
Education
Finance and Insurance
Government and Public Administration
Health and Social Assistance
Homemaker
Hotel and Food Services
Information—Other
Information—Services and Data
Legal Services
Manufacturing—Computer and Electronics
Manufacturing—Other
Military
Hotel and Food Services
Processing
Publishing
Real Estate, Rental, or Leasing
Religious
Retail
Scientific or Technical Services
Software
Telecommunications
Transportation and Warehousing
Energy/ Utilities/ Oil and Gas
Wholesale
Advertising
Automotive
Consulting
Fashion/ Apparel
Human Resources
Market Research
Marketing/ Sales
Shipping/ Distribution
Personal Services
Security
Other

Race/ Ethnicity:

Arab
Asian
Black
White
Hispanic
Latino
Multiracial
Other
Prefer not to Say

Household Income:

Lower I
Lower II
Middle I
Middle II
High I
High II
High III
Prefer Not To Say

Household income mapping varies by country. To see how this breaks down, see the full list under household income criteria by country.

Number of Employees

One
2-5
6-10
11-25
26-50
51-100
101-250
251-500
501-1000
1001-5000
5000+
I don’t work
Prefer not to say

Job Title

Administrative (Clerical or Support Staff)
Analyst
Assistant or Associate
Consultant
Intern
Manager (Group Manager, Sr. Manager, Manager, Program Manager)
Volunteer

Targeting by Mobile Device Criteria

OS Platform

Android
iOS
Web
Windows Phone

Manufacturer

Acer
Apple
Blackberry
Carrefour
Google
Samsung
..and more. (Due to our rapidly refreshing audience, it’s best to type the name of the manufacturer you are looking for into the dropdown search for the most up-to-date list of who we support)

Mobile Carrier

AT&T
B-Mobile (BT)
Bell
China Mobile
T-Mobile
Telstra
Tesco
Softbank
Sprint
Verizon
Vodafone
..and more. (Due to our rapidly refreshing audience, it’s best to type the mobile carrier you are looking for into the dropdown search for the most up-to-date list of who we support)

Pollfish offers 3 screening questions to help you define your audience even further. You can also use these to narrow in on specific behaviors, beliefs, or motivations of your target audience. Be sure to check out our post on how to use screening questions effectively to get the most out of them.

Demographic targeting

Once you have selected your targeting criteria, you’ll see a preview of your audience makeup on the right side of your dashboard, along with an estimated time to completion. Review how to set up targeting with our video to get started.

https://vimeo.com/304695551

by Pollfish Marketing Team

Building Brand Purpose with Market Research

As businesses seek to scale, grow and differentiate themselves from others in their field, they’ll need to have their brand purpose on full display.

Making light of your brand purpose is a critical way to show that your brand is mission-driven and exits beyond the shallow purpose of making a profit. Customers, especially the younger generation are fond of brands with a purpose.

In fact, 92% of Gen Z and 90% of Millennial respondents say they would support a purposeful brand, compared with 81% of Gen X consumers.

Consumers from across the globe also view brands that actively display their purpose in a positive light. 64% of global consumers say brands that communicate their purpose are more attractive. 62% want companies to take a stand on the issues they care about.

This article delves into brand purpose, its importance, examples of companies with visible purpose and how to find and build your own through market research.

Understanding Brand Purpose

This concept refers to a brand’s moral reason for being and what it stands for aside from making a profit and other commercial interests. Typically, a business assumes a brand purpose aligned with what its customers believe.

Also called the North Star and the noble purpose of a brand, it largely deals with finding a reason for the brand’s existence and using it to help its consumers.

Brand purpose is essentially the “why” behind a company. This “why” allows the business to show customers the values it holds and the noble cause it hopes to either achieve or contribute to.

A business’s brand purpose can serve as a reflection of the founders’ lives and experiences, what they consider to be gaps in their market or a major change in their market.

A brand’s purpose can be ethical, moral or political in nature, giving customers the chance to do business with a brand that supports a certain cause or way of life.

A brand purpose should not be confused with a brand promise, which is the general expectation a product or service offers to its customers.

Coming Up With a Brand Purpose

When coming up with a brand purpose, consider how your business intends to make the world improve, or at least a component of it. This can involve affecting social obligations for your target market, environment or society at large.

This will resonate with your consumers and their values and give them another reason to patronize you.

Ask yourself the following to begin finding your brand purpose:

What does your brand stand for?
Does your business have a mission?
What does your business strive to do – or commit to never do?
What values does your brand uphold or plan on upholding?
How can you use your values as a company to strive towards a goal for the greater good?

Questions like these are at the core of brand purpose. Once you answer these, you can study your customers to probe further.

The Importance of Brand Purpose

A brand purpose goes far beyond appearing conscientious in your market.

First off, a powerful brand purpose will set you apart from the competition. Plenty of business rivals may offer similar products, services and experiences, but they are unlikely to share the same brand value of your brand — or any at all.

A brand purpose is a potent aspect of your business to use for building your reputation and strengthening your brand equity. You can do so by establishing your brand as one that is socially, environmentally, politically or otherwise conscious and caring about issues besides its own bottom line.

In turn, this humanizes your brand. Your business will no longer be seen as merely another provider or another cash cow. Instead, it will be recalled as one with a human conscious, one that cares bout a certain issue and it attempting to reach goals that ultimately benefit society in one way or another.

By improving your reputation and heightening your brand as one not solely concerned about profits, you can thus apply your brand purpose in your branding. You can do this across a wide span of campaigns, from branding to PR to advertising and beyond. Your best bet is to apply it to the main conduit of your communications: your content marketing strategy.

This involves directly mentioning your purpose and alluding to it across your blogs, resources pages, social media, landing pages, videos and any other channel that grants you the opportunity to make consumers aware of your brand purpose.

Finally and most importantly, having a brand purpose makes the brand more appealing to the customers, as they will feel that their spending is making a difference in the world. It will also make them feel like they are a part of something greater than just a customer buying journey or shopping session.

A brand purpose enables your business to connect with consumers on a personal level. This is important, as aforementioned, given that customers are becoming increasingly invested in brands that have a purpose.

In fact, 52% of customers say they are more attracted to buy from brands if they stand for something bigger than just the products and services they sell, especially if it aligns with their personal values.

Moreover, 71% of customers say they prefer to buy from a purpose-driven company over another one, should the cost and quality be the same. What’s more astonishing is that despite the statistics of consumers leaving brands after one bad experience, 72% of consumers say they would forgive a company with a brand purpose if it made a mistake.

The implications of these statistics are major, pointing to higher levels of brand trust in purposeful companies. Additionally, it means that when a customer contemplates a brand with purpose, they are also more inclined to remember it, purchase from it and want to work for it.

In addition, when a customer sees a logo of a purpose-driven brand, they’ll associate it with being compassionate, responsible and ethical.

All in all, when brands exhibit a brand purpose, they are effectively standing out among competitors, improving their reputation, gaining ideas for marketing and branding and resonating with customers and their values.

All brands should therefore strive to be purpose-driven.

Examples of Companies With Brand Purpose

Companies across various sectors have taken up a brand purpose. This has given their customers a much deeper meaner to their brand and offerings.

The following lays out a few examples of companies that actively demonstrate their brand purpose:

Dove: The personal care company aims to help women discover the value of real beauty and improve self-esteem worldwide. Their #speakbeautiful movement encouraged women to be kinder to themselves and embrace their natural bodies. The brand creates relatable and realistic marketing instead of the highly edited images common in the beauty industry.
Muji: The Japanese retailer of household items and apparel promotes self-restraint, humility and the natural state of the environment, along with supporting simplicity and moderation. It sustains the latter by offering functional products with a simple design and are practical to use. As for the former, Muji emphasizes reducing production, recycling and packaging waste.
Crayola: The art supply company works to help parents and teaches foster creativity within children. It enables those in children’s lives to inspire them to be “creatively alive” instead of simply using their products. Crayola had various programs dedicated to this purpose, a mission they attempt to achieve globally.
Everlane: The American clothing retailer has a threefold brand purpose. It is bent on creating environmentally friendly products, providing high-quality products and being transparent as possible. The company sources only from ethical factories — the kinds that have fair wages and hours. It uses fine materials and brands itself as being radically transparent. When it comes to the latter, Everlane gives information on how much their clothes cost to be made, which materials they used, the labor involved and even the transporting methods.

How to Find and Build Brand Purpose with Market Research

Market research can help you discover the possible themes and nuances of your brand purpose. This is because there are various market research techniques you can use to study your target market, the group of customers most likely to buy from you.

You can begin conducting market research via secondary sources, such as trade magazines, news websites, blogs and competitor websites to see the kinds of purposes your competitors are aligning themselves with.

You can also use these sources to understand which purposes resonate the most with customers and the kinds of campaigns brands in your field and beyond have created based on their brand purpose. This will help you form the onset of your brand purpose.

Next, shift into primary market research by conducting survey research on your target market. This will give you firsthand insights into all of your customers’ thoughts in relation to current issues and popular causes.

Use a trusted online survey platform to reach the correct target market sample. This platform should allow you to extract the exact amount of respondents that you input in the screener, including quotas on various audiences.

Your survey platform should have the option of being able to incorporate multiples audiences in one survey. That way, you can observe different target market segments and customer personas under one survey study, allowing you to analyze the data via the same dashboard.

You should also be able to reach the correct respondents via demographics, behaviors, and even by their specific answers to screening questions.

Ask your respondents about various social issues, from the environment to education and all else. In your survey, you should seek out which issue and which message resonates the most with your target market, along with which elicits the strongest reactions. In this way, you may need to insert elements of emotional marketing.

You should also add A/B testing into your surveys to see which messaging or issues affect your customers the most, along with which they care most about. Remember to conduct market research beforehand, as you’ll need to know your customers before you set out to find your brand purpose.

You can continue surveying customers after you’ve decided on a brand purpose, to find the right messaging and images. Do so with A/B testing, including sequential testing.

Differentiating Your Business

Creating a brand purpose and applying it to various marketing campaigns will differentiate your business and ultimately allow it to survive. But before you insert a brand purpose into your branding, you’ll need to find a strong one that your target market deems important and compelling.

To do so, you’ll need a strong market research platform to host your survey campaigns. Such a platform should run on random device engagement (RDE) sampling, so you can reach customers in their natural digital environments, instead of pre-recruiting them. This removes social pressures in the surveys and will cut back on survey bias.

You should also use a mobile-first platform, since mobile dominates the digital space and no one wants to take surveys in a mobile environment that’s not built for them.

The online survey platform you opt for should also offer artificial intelligence and machine learning to remove low-quality data, disqualify low-quality data and offer a broad range of survey and question types.

It should also allow you to survey anyone. As such, you’ll need a platform with a reach to millions of consumers, along with one that offers the Distribution Link feature. This feature will allow you to send your survey to specific customers, instead of only deploying them across a vast network.

With an online survey platform with all of these capabilities, you’ll be able to motivate your customers into making repeat purchases.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

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How to Promote Repeat Purchases with Survey Research

repeat purchases

You’ll need to cultivate repeat purchases from your customers given the weight of customer retention. Even if you operate a B2C retail establishment, your business will greatly benefit from existing customers shopping from your business continuously.

90% of customers are more likely to purchase more, and 93% of customers are more likely to make repeat purchases at companies with excellent customer service.

61% of SMBs report that more than half of their revenue comes from repeat purchases of existing customers, rather than from new customers. These statistics demonstrate how clear the value of repeat purchases is.

However, despite these perceptible benefits, 96% of customers stop doing business with a company due to poor customer service. This damaging statistic proves that almost all customers will not simply make fewer purchases with a business, but abandon it entirely.

As such, brands must elevate their CX and understand their customers to retain customers.

This article explores the concept of repeat purchases, their implications, importance and how to foster it with survey research.

Understanding Repeat Purchases

A self-evident concept, repeat purchases refer to instances of customers purchasing more than once from the same business. This behavior is usually associated with buying from a business multiple times, instead of just twice.

As such, repeat purchases result from customer retention, which is the result of consumer loyalty. There are many building blocks of loyalty, including providing a great customer experience, reasonable prices, product satisfaction, brand equity, brand trust, satisfying all of your consumer preferences and more.

When strategizing how to stimulate repeat purchases, businesses can create various campaigns, from advertising to PR, social media and various others to facilitate repeat purchases through different purchasing methods. This means that although you may have customers who purchase in-store, you can still pique online or phone orders.

For example, assume you have a customer persona who prefers buying via the brick-and-mortar way. They can still be swayed to make an online purchase, should it be compelling enough. You can achieve this by offering a special online promotion, introducing an online rewards program, or appealing to this persona in some other way that makes it tempting for them to buy online.

At any rate, you can forge repeat purchases through omnichannel communications and various purchasing options.

The Importance of Repeat Purchases

Repeat purchases are important for several reasons.

First off, when customers buy from the same company, it is a sign of customer loyalty, which means that not only will your customers continue buying from you, but they will be less inclined to shop from your competitors.

As such, you’ll be drawing in a larger customer retention rate, and as you’ve read across multiple CX, marketing and eCommerce outlets, customer retention is more profitable than acquisition. Various figures prove this, such as the fact that acquiring new customers costs five times as much as keeping existing ones and that selling to existing customers has a success rate of 60-70%, while it is only 5-20% for new customers.

High levels of repeat purchases also point to a low customer churn rate, another necessity for keeping your business afloat, given the need to retain a stream of customers. In addition, once customers churn, it is going to be difficult to bring them back to your business, as they've already made up their minds — and not from hearsay but their experience from being your customers.

If your customers didn’t like your products, they wouldn’t buy them — unless it was due to utter necessity and no other choice. As such, when customers buy repeatedly from you, not only are you lowering your customer acquisition cost due to higher retention, but you’re also building trust around your brand. The more customers buy from you, the more reliable you are perceived to be.

repeat purchases

Customers who make repeat purchases are also important given their higher expenditures, as repeat customers spend 67% more than new customers. This isn’t surprising, as retained customers know what to expect from their favorite brand(s), therefore being more liberal with their spending.

Customers who buy from you year after year are critical, as they signify a segment that has the potential or currently carries a high Customer Lifetime Value. This metric relays the worth of customers during their entire relationship with the company. It involves both purchases and the length of a relationship customers have with businesses.

Value also increases in reverse, meaning that a brand appears to be more valuable to customers who make continuous purchases. As such, these purchases exemplify high levels of customer value, which is the perception of what a product or service is worth to a customer versus its alternatives.

All in all, when customers make repeat purchases, they are easier to sell to, improve a brand’s reputation and generate higher overall value for a company.

7 Effective Ways to Increase Repeat Purchases

Businesses can try experimenting with different methods to increase and strengthen customers by making repeat purchases.

The following enumerates 7 methods you can use to increase repeat purchases:

how to create repeat purchases

Offer perks via VIP programs.
1. These programs grant elite status to customers who buy more, directly leading to repeat purchases.
Create referral programs with incentives for current customers that bring in new ones.
1. This will whet customers’ interest in staying customers, as they will be rewarded.
Create discounts and seasonal campaigns to draw in continuous purchases for special occasions.
1. This will entice customers to buy repeatedly by buying more than just one kind of product. For example, various Halloween candy or Christmas decor.
Retarget customers via email marketing.
1. Target your customers directly after they make their first purchase via email marketing.
2. You can give them the option of subscribing to a mailing list or suggesting similar products now and then.
Create exclusive deals for customers through rewards programs.
1. While creating seasonal promotions is useful, you can extend your deals and discounts by creating rewards programs for customers.
2. This directly leads to customers buying more.
Appeal to customers with marketing personalization.
1. No one likes to be marketed to, especially in generic ways.
2. Creating personalization makes customers feel seen, heard and far more special than they would as recipients of non-personalized offers and messages.
Ask for user-generated content.
1. This involves content that your consumers produce via using your products and services, which you then feature across your website and other digital properties.
2. This method creates bonds between brands and customers, which gives brands an edge in that customers view them as more than just another business.

How to Stimulate Repeat Purchases with Survey Research

Market research is the underlying mechanism for increasing repeat purchases. This is because, to appeal to your customers, you’ll need to understand them at a deeper level. This way, you can properly market to and serve them.

repeat purchases

When you understand all of your customers’ desires, needs, aversions and perceptions, you’ll be able to create marketing campaigns that compel them to interact with your brand, as you push them further down the sales funnel until they convert.

There are various market research techniques that you can apply to better understand your customers; this involves gaining insights into customer behavior and your customer’s needs, along with their reactions to your current marketing campaigns.

Wheel secondary market research is a good starting point for learning about your customers, your best bet is to gain insights that are timely and unique to your target. You can achieve this by conducting survey research, a kind of primary research.

Surveys allow you to inquire into any topic, granting you full control over your market research study. You can create surveys for several purposes, as there are various surveys and different types of survey questions you can ask.

The following lists some of the key survey types to use to increase repeat customer spending:

The customer service survey
1. Bad service can deter customers from making any further purchases from you and this survey gauges your customer service.
The customer retention survey
1. Given that repeat purchases indicate retention, use this survey to help you determine your degree of customer retention.
The CES survey (Customer Effort Score Survey)
1. This survey measures customer effort, the degree or amount of effort that a customer puts into a certain interaction with a company.
The longitudinal survey
1. You can measure the opinions your customers have on your products and services by surveying them over longer periods with this kind of survey.
The product satisfaction survey
1. Especially useful for observing attitudes and opinions of your products, this survey allows you to get direct feedback on the products themselves.
2. This helps you improve your product features and innovate new ones.

Fueling Your Business

You should always aim to encourage your target market to make repeat purchases. After all, these are the lifeblood of customer retention, yielding all of its benefits. To spur this shopping phenomenon, you’ll need to understand your customers at a deeper level.

You’ll need a strong market research platform to host your survey campaigns. Such a platform should run on random device engagement (RDE) sampling, so that you can reach customers in their natural digital environments, instead of pre-recruiting them. This removes social pressures in the surveys and will cut back on survey bias.

You should also use a mobile-first platform, as mobile dominates the digital space and no one wants to take surveys in a mobile environment that’s not built for them.

It should also allow you to survey anyone. As such, you’ll need a platform with a reach to millions of consumers, along with one that offers the Distribution Link feature.

This feature will allow you to send your survey to specific customers, instead of only deploying them across a vast network.

With an online survey platform with all of these capabilities, you’ll be able to motivate your customers to make repeat purchases.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

Pollfish Marketing Team

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